Nother CarGuy

Late last year Xiaomi president Lin Bin teased an upcoming phone with a 48-megapixel camera, and today the company has revealed it in full. Despite the eye-catching headline spec, it’s turned out to be a product under the entry-level Redmi brand called the Redmi Note 7. Design-wise, it looks very similar to Xiaomi’s smaller, low-cost Mi Play announced a few weeks back, with a circular display notch, a back panel with colorful gradients, a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor, and rear-facing dual cameras — one of which uses that much-vaunted 48-megapixel image sensor and an f/1.8 lens, the other of which is 5 megapixels and used for depth information. The camera can take photos with its 48 million tiny 0.8-micron pixels in good lighting, or combine neighboring pixels for what’s claimed to be the equivalent of a 12-megapixel photo taken with larger 1.6-micron pixels. At half an inch across, the sensor is physically quite a bit larger than what’s typically found in smartphones, whic...

Indian car maker Mahindra has officially opened its new North American HQ and manufacturing facility in Auburn Hills, the first new OEM plant in the Detroit area in 25 years. The new factory will be used to produce Mahindra’s upcoming new SUV, called the Roxor. The Indian company will reveal the new model towards the end of the year. The brand is known for rugged SUVs such as the Willys Jeep-esque Thar. Mahindra expects its new US factory to churn out 12,000 Roxor SUVs per year. The car maker was recently announced as one of the five manufacturers selected by USPS (United States Postal Service) to produce prototype delivery trucks for testing and evaluation as well. According to reports from the Indian press, the new Roxor will be based on a modified platform of the Thar model, an off-roader that looks a lot like the classic Jeep Wrangler, and will be powered by Ssangyong’s 1.6-liter engine as used in the Tivoli small SUV. The company didn’t give a timetable for when they wi...

Volkswagen have been looking at launching a budget brand in emerging markets since 2012, and after prolonged talks, an official decision has been finally taken. Confirmed to AutoExpress by the company's bosses, the sub-brand will launch in China at first in two years' time and after a settling-in period, it will probably become available in India, Brazil and Mexico as well. Volkswagen's local joint-venture partner, FAW, will give a helping hand in the development and production of the first cars which are expected to be a small saloon and a midsized SUV. Both vehicles are said to make use of the PQ chassis architecture of the Golf Mk6, along with some components coming from the MQB platform. "It won't be off MQB. The brand will use some MQB components, but not the MQB architecture. If you compare this to Dacia and what it is doing, that's more like it", said the VW development chief, Frank Welsch. The official confirmed a 'budget car', w...